11
December 2013 A pre-Christmas treat in today's mail:
The
Complete Uncle, being the result of Marcus Gipps's Kickstarter
project to reprint the classic Uncle books by J.P. Martin as a single
omnibus volume, with all the original Quentin Blake illustrations and
much more. With reviews and appreciations by Neil Gaiman, other pundits
and fans, and even me. (Me!)

22
November 2013 Well, it's taken me a long while to get over the
post-Novacon symptoms of coughs, sniffles and blasphemous ichor –
the natural consequence of exposing oneself to the germ pool of SF
fandom. This month I launched an almost imperceptibly low-profile
campaign of promoting books for awards ... not my own efforts but the
very worthy Algis Budrys collections published this year by
Ansible Editions (click link for
more). Please think about it.

1
October 2013 I don't seem to have had anything like enough
recovery time or indeed enough sleep since the September issue, but
here's Ansible
315.

29
September 2013 Two garden snapshots. The grapes, one of more
than half a dozen bunches, are the latest from the vine in the back
garden. The watermelon, weighing some 20 pounds, mysteriously appeared
in the front garden this morning – already sliced, exactly as
shown. Is it a Fortean phenomenon? The vegetable equivalent of a horse's
head in the bed? ("Tonight, you will sleep with the cucumbers. ")
Bafflement reigns.

28
September 2013 After years of accumulating "connections"
and "endorsements" which never seemed even remotely useful to
me, I've deleted my LinkedIn account. Please don't invite me back.

13
September 2013 Antique Bookmarks Dept: this old London tube
ticket fell out of a 1936 edition of A.P. Herbert's Honeybubble &
Co. The blurry cancellation on the back seems to read 26 JLY 1938.
This, according to the archives of the SF Encyclopedia, is a
date on which absolutely nothing of SF interest took place.

2
September 2013 Once again (where does the time go?) it's Ansible
Day, and here is the
September issue. As the poet wrote, "With many a weary
step, and many a groan, / Up a high hill he heaves a huge round stone
..." Today I got my personal stone, called Ansible, to
the top of that hill for the 314th time. And again "The huge
round stone, resulting with a bound, / Thunders impetuous down and
smokes along the ground. " Soon it'll be time to start the next
long push, but not before I've had a drink and a night's sleep.
(Remembering uneasily that Kingsley Amis's most alcoholic character in
The Old Devils quotes the first of those couplets as suitable
commentary on getting up in the morning ...)

28
August 2013 Far away in San Antonio, Texas, the
World SF Convention is
revving up. No, I'm not attending, for a variety of uninteresting
reasons. See you all, or some of you, in
London next year.  Thanks
to everyone who bought the ebook edition of The
Leaky Establishment, still in virtual print. I may yet summon
up the energy to convert other Langford works to this format. But where
to start?

7
August 2013 Kim Huett sends a clipping from
Ambrose
Bierce's column, "The Passing Show", in the December
1905 issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine – reacting not wholly
reverently to the death of
Jules Verne.
Always interesting to see one SF
Encyclopedia subject writing about another:

5
August 2013 Farewell to our local loan sharks. "Loans for
Logbooks" has been operating just up the road in large premises
that used to be a car accessories supermarket and a succession of
furniture shops. Just saw, on my way to the post office, a notice on
their door saying that the holding company "Tough Times Ltd"
went into administration on 31 July. My only contact with them (not
being one of the satisfied customers who regularly smashed the windows)
was trying to cash a Western Union transfer. They claimed to be a
special sort of Western Union branch where you can pay in but not
collect. Somewhere I hear the playing of the world's tiniest violin.

3
August 2013 Yes, there is an
August issue of Ansible,
and yes, it appeared on the first of the month but didn't get mentioned
here. I blame the hot weather. Oh, and the government.

26
July 2013 For those who wanted an ebook edition of
The Leaky Establishment (the
most popular of my few novels, with a fan base practically into double
digits) – it's here!
There was a slight delay while a volunteer proofread the whole thing on
her Kindle and reported a few horrors, like an unforgivably missing
space after a comma in Terry Pratchett's introduction, that had lingered
since the 2001 print edition. Buy a copy and, as Spike Milligan used to
say, Help This Man Become A Capitalist.  Yes, ebook editions of
the Algis Budrys
critical collections will follow soon. And other Langford titles
too, if anyone is incautious enough to show interest.

17
July 2013 Since the last post here I've been working on ebook
editions of the
Algis Budrys critical collections and also (just for fun) my own
The Leaky Establishment. Initially I thought of marketing these
through Smashwords, but that outfit's inflexible submission requirement
of MS Word document format is just too depressing – so ebooks will
be available directly from Ansible
Editions. Whose front page currently records another
Lulu.com discount offer: 20% off any
purchase until 19 July.

4
July 2013 It's been a busy week. On 1 July, after several days
of frantic preparation and website updating, we finished publishing the
Algis Budrys critical trilogy and announced this in
Ansible 312.
Details at Ansible Editions,
whose front page currently reports a 25% discount offer for any purchase
from Lulu.comon 3-5 July only
(one use only). Go on, buy the books....  Today I had another of
those terrifying visits to the Royal Berkshire Hospital's Eye Block, to
learn whether cataract surgery awaits me in the near future. Well, no:
the medics originally expected that this would be necessary in July
2012, but the July 2013 message is simply "Come back for another
check in nine months. "  Also another bottle of
bubbly arrived on Tuesday: June was the first month ever in which I won
the Independent's "Inquisitor" crossword twice.
It
was quite a simple puzzle really.

26
June 2013 At last, advance copies of the final instalment of
Algis Budrys's
collected Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction "Books"
columns have reached me, and I'm gloating over the set of three volumes:
Benchmarks Continued (2012), Benchmarks Revisited and
now Benchmarks Concluded, the last two to be published
simultaneously in the very near future. It's been a long haul since the
party at Novacon years ago when Greg Pickersgill and I rashly said to
each other, "Wouldn't it be good if someone reprinted ...?"
There are 156 "Books" columns in all (also a bonus essay on
Stephen King written for the special King issue of F&SF),
totting up to some 467,000 words. Assembling them was a lot of work,
especially the laborious scanning and OCR (Greg), the eye-straining
proofreading (both of us plus Little Helpers) and the preparation of
each volume's index (me). Keep watching the skies at
Ansible Editions! The columns
themselves are a substantial part of the work that won Budrys the
Pilgrim Award for life achievement in sf scholarship.

19
June 2013 Another translated anthology containing a story of
mine: the Greek edition of Steve Jones's Cthulhu-themed Shadows over
Innsmouth.

8
June 2013 Before I'd looked at the Inquisitor crossword in
today's Independent, Hazel pointed out that the included winner
list for an earlier puzzle was headed by one David Langford of Reading.
So, unless there's another me in town, the traditional bottle of
champagne should be on its way. Whoopee! The puzzle in question, with
good old William Shakespeare (anag. "I am a weakish speller")
as its theme, is explained on
the
Fifteensquared blog. God I had genius in those days....

17
May 2013 Gosh, I have a story in the impressive volume below.
It's the Russian version of Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of New
Sherlock Holmes Adventures.

8
May 2013 Avram Davidson's bizarrely erudite (and sometime
arguably bonkers) essays on the possible (if rarely probable) roots of
myth and legend are collected in the 1993 small-press volume Adventures
in Unhistory, a great favourite of mine. There seemed no hope of any
further enchantment in this vein, but a long-lost 1981 "Adventure"
typescript has come to light and was published today to mark the
twentieth anniversary of the author's death. I devoured my review copy
with ill-concealed glee. The very Davidsonian title is
The Wailing of the
Gaulish Dead; Eileen Gunn contributes a brief but perfect
introduction.

17
April 2013 I remembered to check the Sunday Telegraph
for 14 April and confirmed that this contained my latest batch of
reviews almost too small to be seen with the naked eye (more or less
uncut, although the summary of The Rapture of the Nerds has
suffered a bit; no link because it doesn't yet seem to have reached the
Telegraph website). Of the wall-to-wall Thatcher eulogies
filling the rest of the paper, I will only say: Gorblimey.

10
April 2013 Yes, it's my birthday, and one of those big ominous
ones too. Thanks for all messages of greeting and/or gloating. The most
utterly unexpected was a piece in Monday's Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung – tucked away behind a paywall, but
Hannes Riffel sent this
PDF (which Google Translate doesn't render very well). Gosh.

2
April 2013Ansible 309, the April issue, is delayed by
illness (mostly mine, but Hazel isn't well either). Sorry.

30
March 2013 I continue not to be at
Eastercon (it's a lovely
day here in Reading and I feel too bloody awful to go out and enjoy it)
but will be there in spirit for the Bad Death [Scenes] Awards at 7pm
Saturday evening – see
official programme schedule. Those unlucky enough to attend should
hear some redolent lines and passages from the
Thog Files, supplied by special
request....

26
March 2013 Being in the grip of various bodily
unpleasantnesses – none apparently life-threatening – I've
cancelled all travel plans and am staying home trying to keep warm while
reading genre books for an imminent review deadline.
SF Encyclopedia
updates are mostly on hold, and today I'm missing long-planned revelry
with brother Jon in South Wales. It's just as well I'd decided (for
reasons of private personal caprice) to skip
Eastercon, or still more
prepaid travel bookings would be going to waste.

1
March 2013 St David's Day, and the daffodils are in bloom
elsewhere in Reading but not in our miserable garden. Hazel and I
celebrated the occasion with tasteful pies at
Sweeney &
Todd's in Castle Street before stuffing envelopes with the print
edition of Ansible
308 – whose Bunny Cat cartoon is, Brad Foster explains, a
special "Easter-ish tie-in". Clearly I have underestimated the
depth of our artist's religious feelings.

11
February 2013 For anyone not utterly bored with the saga of
the Langford eyesight: those computer-monitor-only glasses arrived last
week and are helping a lot.  Like so many others, I couldn't
resist playing with the
PULP-O-MIZER
Pulp Magazine Cover Generator. Alas, only preset "magazine
titles" are allowed – no custom choices like Unbelievable
ANSIBLE Stories:

1
February 2013 I'm struggling with the expensive new glasses,
and awaiting a second (not so expensive) pair exclusively for working at
the computer screen, which continues to be a pain. I wonder how many
typos there still are in today's
Ansible 307?

15
January 2013 Early in the New Year the eye surgeons decided I
didn't need the expected further operation, at least for another twelve
months. At last, after tiresome blurriness in my right eye ever since
late January 2012, the problem could be transferred to the opticians.
Who demanded the most staggeringly enormous sum I've ever paid for new
glasses: these are now awaited with fear and trembling. Let's hope they
work.

1
January 2013 What, already? Far too busy here for any kind of
inspirational New Year message, but good wishes to anyone who sees this.
The January Ansible, which must in any case wait until the
printers open again on Thursday, may well be delayed further than that.
So it goes.